Spatial Selection of Features within Perceived and Remembered Objects
9 Pages Posted: 18 Apr 2022
Date Written: April 01, 2009
Abstract
Our representation of the visual world can be modulated by spatially specific attentional biases that depend flexibly on task goals. We compared searching for task-relevant features in perceived versus remembered objects. When searching perceptual input, selected task-relevant and suppressed task-irrelevant features elicited contrasting spatiotopic ERP effects, despite them being perceptually identical. This was also true when participants searched a memory array, suggesting that memory had retained the spatial organization of the original perceptual input and that this representation could be modulated in a spatially specific fashion. However, task-relevant selection and task-irrelevant suppression effects were of the opposite polarity when searching remembered compared to perceived objects. We suggest that this surprising result stems from the nature of feature- and object-based representations when stored in visual short-term memory. When stored, features are integrated into objects, meaning that the spatially specific selection mechanisms must operate upon objects rather than specific feature-level representations.
Note:
Funding Information: D.E.A. is supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK. D.E.A. and G.S. are supported by a project grant from the John Fell fund (Oxford University Press). G.S. and A.C.N. are both supported by project grants from the Wellcome Trust. B-C.K. was supported by a Scholarship from the National Science Council of Taiwan.
Declaration of Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Ethics Approval Statement: Each participant provided written informed consent. The study was approved by the medical ethics review board at the University of Oxford, UK.
Keywords: ERPs; electrophysiology; spatial attention; task-set control; visual short-term memory; working memory
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation